Nature

So I'm out here at Stanford Sierra Camp on the shores of Falling Leaf Lake. Lotsa trees. Big rocks. Thin air - around 8000 feet or so - so a short flight of steps is more difficult than it should be.

Me? I'm blogging in the business center. I even spent a few minutes upgrading their IE to the latest version.

Some people are more connected to Nature than I am. Some people spend their entire lives in Nature, or working on behalf of Nature. I feel vaguely guilty about my lack of regular connection to Nature. Which is not to say I don't feel connected - I do - but just not at the level of some people.

Is this important? Should I look for more ways to get grounded? To feel grass under my bare feet? To put my hands in dirt? Watch birds?

Regardless of the fact that I am blogging when I could be hiking, I feel deeply connected to the natural universe. The keen interest I had as a child - when astronomy, ornithology, botany, paleontology, geology, and other ologies loudly called my name - that interest remains. I just have to reach for it. Name it. Remember it.

The memory comes with some regret - I am past the age of becoming an astronaut or a botanist - but at the same time, I feel okay about it. I have a suspicion that I will still learn about the natural universe, and also enjoy it on its own terms, without a rigorous academic structure, just strolling back to my room at Fallen Leaf Lake.

That's okay, isn't it?

It occurs to me...

...that I am purposefully ignoring the news of the past week. Grisly news. Ghastly events.

On one hand, I applaud myself for staying focused on the topic of this blog. For trying to keep hold of the broader brush. On the other hand, I feel disingenuous and vaguely disrespectful.

People are out there dying for what they believe matters most.

Too Bad

One of the questions that I have to ask immediately after "What matters most?" is this: Why do we have so many problems?

Maybe because it's a presidential election year, I find myself thinking in terms of the departments of the executive's cabinet. It's a good system for identifying what's what.

Agriculture: well, at least there seems to be lots of food. Too bad there's such an emphasis on meat production. Too bad family farms are nearly dead and agribusiness is the order of the day. Too bad we utilize land in extraordinarily taxing ways, piling deadly pesticides upon petrochemical fertilizers and irrigating the whole shebang with water diverted from dangerously depleted aquifers.

Commerce: too bad that big business is safer and fatter than ever. About 40% of "C" corporations have paid no federal income taxes in any of the past five years.

Defense: too bad that we are pouring billions of dollars into a war we cannot win. We are losing hearts and minds around the world. We are killing our own family members and the families of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis.

Education: too bad that people are more poorly educated than even a decade ago. We can't keep good teachers in the classroom. We can barely keep the classrooms.

Energy: too bad that oil is at its highest price since the last Bush administration. I have a small, old car that takes $30 of gasoline. Oy.

Health: too bad that people are amazingly fatter than even a decade ago. Despite this trend, we are placing more fast food outlets inside schools.

Homeland security: too bad that we didn't even NEED this department in the 20th century. Oh, wait - that's not too bad. That's actually a good thing.

Housing: too bad that there are more homeless people than ever.

Interior: too bad that we are losing species at the fastest rate in modern history. Atmospheric and water pollution levels are rising. Global warming is a fact.

Justice: too bad that we are in danger of losing decades of hard-won rights to privacy. Women will surely lose their right to abortion if the Bush Administration has its way.

Labor: too bad that there are more people are out of work, underemployed, or fearful of losing their job than at any time since the Great Depression.

State: too bad that our diplomatic corp is in open rebellion against the direction of foreign policy.

Transportation: too bad that our freeways are clogged, roads are potholed, airplanes routinely crash, and trains derail.

Treasury: too bad that monetary policy isn't doing anything except helping the rich.

Too bad, too bad, too bad.

We are several years into the 21st century, an epoch which once held promise of flying cars, two-way wrist radios, and a great deal of leisure. Instead, we have SUVs, cell phones, and a workforce that clocks more hours per capita than at any time since the 19th century, when farmers worked 14-hour days.

Too bad.

Digital Natives

We had a guy in the chair today talking about "digital natives versus digital immigrants."

He said everyone over 40 is a digital immigrant - someone whose life-view was formed prior to the overwhelming involvement of computers in our daily lives.

So I am a digital immigrant. I may be fluent; I may be able to achieve at a high level in the digital culture; but I am an immigrant nonetheless.

The digital natives - roughly speaking, anyone born after 1970 - have grown up with computers, digital cameras, and cellular phones. They learned video games along with hopscotch; their childhoods are documented with video tape rather than Super8; they likely grew up with a TV in their bedroom, and rather than three networks plus a handful of independents, they have always known dozens of cable TV networks, along with 24-hour movie channels, home shopping, and infomercials.

Most likely, the digital natives don't know what it's like to read a daily newspaper with zeal. As for their music, the soundtracks of their lives are full of computer wizardry. And of course, they share their music via MP3, not a delicate plastic disc in a square cardboard jacket.

Most of this doesn't matter much, except in the degree to which there is a difference between the experience of a digital native versus a digital immigrant. That degree of difference seems to grow every day. It seems to matter more every day. As much as I felt the divide between my parents' experience and my own, I feel a greater divide exists between my generation and the next, not to mention the generation after that, and after that...

There will always be fresh 18-year-olds. Here I am, growing more distant from 18 every day. How much does this matter? A great deal. A great, huge, hairy deal.

Golf Cart

Like many who work at large facilities, I go from one place to another via golf cart. It's faster than walking, relatively quiet, and fairly green. To be sure, it's not as pleasant as walking - nothing beats discretionary walking for sheer pleasantness - but because it's a small and slow-moving vehicle, a golf cart is a very humanitarian form of mechanized transport.

For one thing, it allows society. My golf cart top-ends at 10 mph. This is slow compared to cars, but it's very near a bicyclist's unhurried pace. As I share paths with bicyclists, trips in my golf cart are opportunities to be social. When a bicyclist is making somewhere between 9 and 11 mph, there is a slow-motion pass-by. A casual greeting is called for. "Hello!" often brings a counter-greeting. "Nice day for a ride, isn't it?" can start a conversation. For those who come up quickly and find themselves unable to pass because my cart and other traffic combine to make things dicey, a heart-felt, "Sorry! This is as fast as this thing goes!" can bring a smile and a courteous reply.

Plus, there's the fact that a golf cart can go off-road - onto pedestrian paths - between buildings, in courtyards, and on small short-cuts hardly wide enough for three walking abreast. On these paths, I go slow. I creep cautiously toward blind corners. I smile a lot at people who worry that I am a golf-cart Mario Andretti. (They exist, giving us careful, respectful golf-carters a bad name.)

Again, a chance for human interaction typically absent from car-driving or simple walking. If I met the same people as fellow pedestrians, they would likeley avoid my eye. On the road, as fellow drivers, they would never think to look at me. (Just as well. They're probably on a cell-phone and distracted already.)

Thus the view from a golf cart - more humane, personal, and social than one would think. Except there's another level to it, not so pleasant; a kind of classism. Who is that fellow in the golf cart? Why does he have a golf cart, and not me? Why is he so special?

This is, I suppose, a variant on my own feelings as I watch someone drive by in a Porsche Boxster. I would like to drive a Porsche Boxster. I mean, I would like to drive one for the sheer luxury, the amazing responsiveness, that I imagine to be part of the experience. (I have never driven one, sorry to say.) Except I would never buy one, because they seem to me to be so excessive, so much part of the world of conspicuous consumption that I detest on principle while feeling mildly jealous in practice. (I could never in a million years afford a Boxster, by the way.) Even if I had a million dollars laying around, I couldn't in good faith buy a Boxster. For me, there are too many other things that matter more than driving a sweet car.

Now, I don't suppose that people who see me in a golf cart and shoot me openly quizzical looks are lusting after my golf cart like I lust after a Boxster. But you take my point. There's a thing - a class thing, a money thing, a privilege thing - that comes into play when we gauge what we have versus what someone else has, especially when someone else is right next to you, in a golf cart or a Boxster. This thing matters, for both good and bad reasons. If only because this thing happens as a routine part of my own human existence, I have to figure out where I stand in the world of class, money, and privilege. It's almost an automatic calculation, part of what I do when I meet people. Even if I'm just seeing them from a distance - what's their story? How did they get to be the person they are, with the things they have?

To be fair, this is a small part of my assessments and calculations with regard to other people. But to another person - someone more driven by acquisitiveness (and we allI know a few people like that) - class, money and privilege matter a great deal. They might put a bright face on their self-interest - after all, having a middle class existence and money in the bank is not in itself a bad thing, and it can afford security and flexibility which can be productive and positive. But the danger is there: seduced by comfort and slipping toward complacency, we can put too much value on our wealth. We can forget that our status in the golf cart is neither here nor there when it comes to our status in terms of what matters most.

What Matters Most

You can read the title with your choice of punctuation:

What matters most?
What matters most!
What matters most?!

Me, I'm overwhelmed by all the things that matter. Some are relatively inflexible: e.g., my age, gender, and race matter a great deal in my day-to-day life, but I can't do much about them.

Others things are flexible: religion, political affiliation, and work are hugely important, but I am (theoretically) capable of changing them.

A short list of yet more things that matter: sexual identity, romantic relationships, family, friends, health, diet, education, geography, class. How tall are you? What's your body type? Your favorite sport? Do you play an instrument? What kind of car do you drive?

All of these things matter. It's not easy to identify something that that matters most to everyone. Depending on who you are, the type of car you drive may affect your daily existence more than your age or race. Perhaps this morning's choice of clothes may be the single most important decision all day. If you're a brain surgeon or an airline pilot, last night's choice of entertainment may have a life-and-death affect on many other people today.

For myself, I'm trying to figure out what matters most on a personal level, with little time for systematically thinking and worrying about what matters most to the bulk of humanity. But I do think and worry, in part because, in my daily life, I am exposed to all sorts of people - experts and pundits on every subject, or at least on every subject likely to find itself discussed on television. I work at a studio that feeds talking heads to the insatiable 24-Hour News Beast. The Beast eats everything, although its four basic food groups are politics, entertainment, business, and sports.

This morning at 5:30 a.m. I fed The Beast an eminent commentator on business affairs. He arrived in a nice car, wearing nice clothes, with a nice haircut, a nice tan, and a nice smile. For all that, I'm not sure he's nice. I'm open-minded about him because he seems smart and articulate. I like to think smart and articulate people are more likely to be nice than stupid and mute people. But I'm not sure about this idea. This nice guy seemed to suggest that the brutalizing of Iraqi prisoners was bad, but that the effect on the markets was worse.

"I don't think people are all that shocked that there is brutality in war - I mean, it's a war - but what is beginning to strike at the heart of most investors is the issue of confidence. What investors need more than anything else is confidence in the future, confidence in their leadership. And you have to really wonder about the competence of the military structure that not just allowed this to happen but allowed them to take pictures of it! How stupid do you have to be? I think when you come right down to it that's the worst problem here."

He concluded with, "I think the solution to the prisoner abuse scandal is for America to send a couple hundred trial lawyers over to Iraq and get a class action suit going. See if they can extract about ten billion dollars out of America for this."

Now, I'm not easily shocked by mean-spirited and inappropriate humor. I have been guilty of (at least) inappropriate humor myself. In fact, I recognized myself in this nice guy. Like him, I have often substituted a quick laugh for substantive thinking and analysis.

But right now, I'm inclined to grimace at his lawyer joke. I'd like to see someone like this nice guy talk seriously about how, to the naked and abused Iraqi on the concrete floor of a prison death-camp, it doesn't matter whether "the markets" lose confidence in "the military structure." I'd like to see someone like this nice guy say that what matters most - even on a morning business news show - is something bigger than the morning business news.